Re: best mailbox format?

From: Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>

To: balsa-list gnome org

Subject: Re: best mailbox format?

Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 11:17:06 +0000

On 02/17/2004 11:51:22 PM, Kacper Wysocki wrote:
[ snip ]
> It's strange, but after running a couple of dozen tests on my
> 50mb mail folder, trying out MH, Maildir and mbox, mbox came
> out the fastest! For some reasons (cached data probably)
> opening the mailboxes took between 3 and 5 seconds this time,
> with MH and Maildir doing 5 seconds and the mbox format doing 3
> seconds. Hmm.
>
> -Kacper
See http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/formats.txt.html
for some general discussion of flat-file (e.g. mbox) versus file/
message (e.g. mh and maildir) formats. File/message is more
robust, because there's no single huge file to get scrambled, but
apparently with real-world file systems they're inherently
slower.
Peter
BTW: which version of Balsa were you benchmarking?